Author: peterjang73

NASA’s yellow robotic bee is back at its space hive.

The yellow Astrobee free-flying robot, part of a set of three, is safely working on the International Space Station (ISS) after a flight to and from Earth for repairs.

“After initial checks, Honey was able to independently disengage from its docking station, maneuver through the space station … and redock successfully without crew supervision,” agency officials wrote in an Oct. 6 update, referring to activities completed a few weeks before.

Related: Meet the Astrobees! These tiny, cube-shaped robots have arrived in space

Honey and robo-companions Bumble (colored in blue) and Queen (in green) are cube-shaped robots designed to take some maintenance load off of astronauts, through activities like documenting experiments or taking inventory, agency officials said in 2016.

“In addition, the system serves as a research platform that can be outfitted and programmed to carry out experiments in microgravity — helping us to learn more about how robotics can benefit astronauts in space,” NASA officials wrote at the time.

The Astrobee fleet, managed by NASA’s Ames Research Center, first arrived on the ISS in 2019 aboard two separate cargo ship deliveries. It has engaged astronauts, researchers and students with mid-air maneuvers and autonomous flight. 

Honey returned to Earth for a two-year pit stop, however, on the SpaceX CRS-23 spacecraft in September 2021, according to NASA, before its relaunch to space aboard a Northrop Grumman Cygnus ship in August 2023. 

Re-activation of Honey was supervised by NASA’s Woody Hoburg, a SpaceX Crew-6 astronaut who returned to Earth with the rest of his crew on Sept. 4, 2023. It wasn’t the first time Hoburg played with the hardware; he also worked with Astrobees during a ZeroRobotics competition hosted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this summer, he said in an Aug. 3 post on X (formerly Twitter).

The cube-shaped robot set includes software and a docking system for recharging. They move through the space station using electric fans, relying on cameras and sensors for navigation. A perching arm on each robot lets them grasp on to handrails around the ISS to grab things, or to catch a brief rest.

As of April 2022, Astrobees had accomplished 750 hours and 100 activities of research on the ISS, according to NASA officials. They are also being tested for future ideas: For example, they once found an anomaly during a simulated issue in space.

Aside from space station research, Astrobees are used by students and guest scientists. “Since the robots are modular and can be upgraded, the system gives researchers and scientists diverse capabilities for performing a wide range of experiments inside the station,” NASA officials wrote in 2016.

Astrobee isn’t the first flying robot on the ISS. A previous generation of small freeflyers were called SPHERES, short for Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellite. NASA documentation and imagery suggests the experiment concluded in 2019, but Astrobee continues to build on the “lessons learned” from the two decades of research using SPHERES.

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Five former Ubisoft employees have been arrested following a police investigation. As per GamesIndustry.biz, three of the executives were arrested yesterday and the other two were detained today. Serge Hascoët, former chief creative officer, and Tommy François, former VP of editorial and creative services, were among those arrested.

Both Hascoët and François stepped down following abuse allegations in 2020 with other Ubisoft senior management. Liberation, the French publication that originally reported on the incident, didn’t name the others in custody. These arrests follow a lawsuit filed by Solidaires Informatique, a French labor union, and at least two plaintiffs in 2021. A lawyer involved with the case claimed that the results revealed “systemic sexual violence.”

When GameSpot reached out to Ubisoft for comment, a company spokesperson replied, “Ubisoft has no knowledge of what has been shared and therefore can’t comment.”

Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier originally broke the news about Ubisoft’s “frat-house” culture in 2020. Even after senior management stepped down, employees spoke about the “fear and oppression” they felt while working there. Other notable executives like Maxime Beland, who also resigned after abuse and assault allegations, were absent from the Liberation report.

No information regarding specific charges has been revealed as of yet, but we’ll report back as we learn more.

Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com

Since last November, when OpenAI unleashed the world-conquering ChatGPT, artificial intelligence has stalked creatives like a malignant doppelgänger. You, a presumably human artist, return to work, and AI is there, drawing your comic, writing your script, acting in your place. Your artistry—your identity—has been replaced by a computer program.

Hannah Diamond knows that feeling. Today, she’s an acclaimed member of PC Music, the influential London-based label responsible for pioneering the glitchy shimmering sound of the genre often dubbed hyperpop. But in 2013, the year she and A.G. Cook founded PC Music, it was just the two of them in Cook’s bedroom, finishing off “Pink and Blue,” Diamond’s first hit, her pitch-shifted vocals like a garage edit of a YouTube Kids’ sing-along: Bubblegum popping into a glittery array of pixels.

After “Pink and Blue” came out and Diamond’s career took off, she began noticing a certain kind of think piece. These articles shared a conviction: Diamond wasn’t real. Instead, she was a model in a pink North Face jacket, and like something out of Singing in the Rain, it was Cook behind the curtain, conjuring “Hannah Diamond” on a computer.

What’s more, when it became clear that she was a (flesh and blood) woman, she says, the hype dissipated. Of course, it wasn’t computers that erased Diamond’s personhood back then, but people: a bro-y tech subculture that venerates some and not others. “Because all of the things that A.G. and I were doing and making with my work at the time, I think people thought they were [ideas] that couldn’t come from a female perspective, a female face, or a female-led project,” she says. From Diamond’s perspective, it seemed as though these people wanted to presume she was a machine (and, by proxy, a man).

A decade later, artificial intelligence is heaving artists into a similar nightmare in which AI replaces human creativity—invited in by greedy corporations.

These fears are not universal. Earlier this month, Creative Commons, the American nonprofit that has long pushed for copyright laws more in tune with modern times, published an open letter signed by artists who work with AI. In it, they address Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), whose summits, attended by tech royalty, aim to pressure Congress to legislate artificial intelligence. These artists, who, in their own words, use “generative AI tools to help us put soul in our work,” are attempting to push back against the rising wave of AI acrimony.

The letter notes that despite its newfound visibility, AI use stretches back years and has lowered the barriers to creating art “that has been traditionally limited to those with considerable financial means, abled bodies, and the right social connections.” It has let people pioneer “entirely new artistic mediums,” furthering human creativity, in other words.

In no art form has this been truer than music, the letter notes—opening with a quote from Björk—as the medium has been using “simpler AI tools, such as in music production software, for decades.” For Diamond, and other like-minded musicians in this lineage, AI is just another tool in their arsenal.

Parallels can be drawn to the early life of PC Music. The question then was: How big of a pop song can someone make with just a mic and a laptop? (A decade later, following the ascendance of PC Music and associated acts like Charli XCX and Sophie, the answer emerged: massive.) The chopped-up vocals of Diamond’s first hits, “Pink and Blue,” “Attachment,” and “Every Night,” she explains, were simply the cleanest way to mask any background noise in the home of Cook’s mother. ‘“When you’re faced with limitations, you end up creating a style,” Cook says.

In all my years of reviewing personal technology gadgets, I can count the number of times my jaw has dropped when learning about a new product. It’s good to be a skeptical journalist! But I failed to maintain that detachment when Google demoed a few imaging tricks on its new Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro smartphones. 

Taken in a vacuum, these features are things anyone with knowledge of Photoshop or video editing software can execute. But the new Pixel phones make them accessible to everyone, which is exciting, and frankly a little scary. Let’s go through ’em. 

Magic Editor

Google teased this feature during its developer conference in May. It’s the natural evolution of Magic Eraser, which Google debuted a few years ago. The latter lets you erase unwanted objects in your photo, like a fire hydrant or a person in the background. Magic Editor can warp the whole photo to a new level.

In a demo, Google showed a picture of a girl running on a beach. With Magic Editor in the Google Photos app, a spokesperson pressed on the subject and the software accurately made a cutout. They were then able to move the subject anywhere in the scene, and the software filled in the space left behind with what it thought should be there. These were photos picked by Google, of course, but Magic Editor filled them in with great accuracy. 

Magic Editor also enabled the option to change the scene’s lighting. If you take a photo at noon with harsh lighting, you can easily change it to golden hour to get those wonderfully warm evening tones—and maybe even throw in a sunset!  

In another photo, a kid about to shoot a basketball from the ground. The spokesperson grabbed the subject in the photo, dragged him up into the air to make it look like he was about to dunk, and then casually said, “You can move their shadow too!”